A number of methods and systems have been developed for conducting various processing and/or analyses of biological substances, such as those described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,423,536 for temperature cycling processes, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,843.680, 5,784,154, 5,395,502, and 5,137,609 for separation assay methods, U.S. Pat. No. 5,785,926 for a capillary transport system, international publication WO94/13829 for an isoelectric focusing separation assay system, and U.S. Pat. No. 6,430,512 for a chromatographic fluorescence separation and display system.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 60/589,139, filed Jul. 19, 2004 and entitled “CONTINUOUS DETERMINATION OF CELLULAR CONTENTS BY CHEMILUMINESCENCE”, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 60/617,362, filed Oct. 8, 2004 and entitled “DETERMINATION OF CAPTURED CELLULAR CONTENTS”, and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/185,247, filed Jul. 19, 2005 and entitled “METHODS AND DEVICES FOR ANALYTE DETECTION”, and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/139,100 entitled MICROFLUIDIC DEVICE FOR ANALYZING NUCLEIC ACIDS AND/OR PROTEINS, METHODS OF PREPARATION AND USES THEREOF, the disclosures of all of which are incorporated herein by reference, all describe apparatus and methods for assaying microliter volumes of cellular material by separating constituent substances of the material in a fluid chamber such as a capillary, binding the separated substances in place, then eliciting an optical response from the bound substances such as fluorescence or chemiluminescence. The resulting information has content similar to that of a Western gel blot but without the complex, extensive and time-consuming handling and processing steps that adversely affect reproducibility and make automation difficult. This technique also has advantages such as the ability to assay very small volumes of materials such as those on the cellular level, and good sensitivity due to the ability to receive optical data from chemiluminescence for as long as necessary to obtain a desirable output signal level. However, it would be desirable to automate this technique so that multiple samples may be analyzed simultaneously or in rapid succession with ease and robustness while only consuming minimal volumes of precious reagents and expensive disposables. Thus, further developments are needed.